Updating your app might not keep you safe: How outdated OpenVPN code leaves VPNs exposed
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Believe that downloading the latest release protects you from most known threats?You might be surprised to learn that there could be a set of invisible vulnerabilities lurking inside your state-of-the-art VPN. That's because more than half of Windows VPNs we analyzed include OpenVPN code that hasn’t been updated in over a year — potentially leaving you exposed to a wide range of security and performance threats.OpenVPN is a protocol that determines how data is encrypted and routed between a user's device and a VPN server.
- ▪When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.
- ▪Believe that downloading the latest release protects you from most known threats?You might be surprised to learn that there could be a set of invisible vulnerabilities lurking inside your state-of-the-art VPN.
- ▪That's because more than half of Windows VPNs we analyzed include OpenVPN code that hasn’t been updated in over a year — potentially leaving you exposed to a wide range of security and performance threats.OpenVPN is a protocol that determin
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| Original publisher | TechRadar |
| Canonical URL | https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-services/updating-your-app-might-not-keep-you-safe-how-outdated-openvpn-code-leaves-vpns-exposed |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:08:07 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-29T15:13:18.747Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-29T15:13:26.945Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | YQMZzqZSQv7w · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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VPN VPN Services Updating your app might not keep you safe: How outdated OpenVPN code leaves VPNs exposed Features By Silvia Iacovcich Contributions by Samuel Woodhams, Mike Williams Published 29 July 2026 Our audit of Windows VPNs uncovers a graveyard of old OpenVPN configurations, with more than 50% of apps using versions over a year old. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: OpenVPN | Future | Scott Rodgerson, Unsplash) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Trust your VPN software updates keep you safe? Believe that downloading the latest release…
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